Unremitting Fictionality

The ‘point’ of all this mechanical, logical, purposeful, repetitive stuff that’s always going on all around us is for us to see that there’s no point! That’s the only point. The ‘meaning’ of all this mechanical-compulsive stuff that we keep getting caught up in is to teach us that there is no meaning in it. All mechanical stuff is redundant – that’s its nature, that’s what makes it ‘mechanical’. Mechanical stuff is made up of rules and rules are by their very nature redundant – being redundant iswhat makes rules into rules! We never get anywhere different as a result of following rules and yet we keep thinking that we will, and this is what redundancy is all about.

When something is revealed to us as being redundant then there’s nothing left for us to do other than laugh at it. Laughing is all that’s left, humour is all that’s left. We’re not laughing at the redundant thing for being redundant, we’re laughing at ourselves for believing in it. We’re laughing at ourselves for being so silly so as to take it seriously…

When we take redundant stuff seriously then we ourselves become redundant. Naturally we do. Of course we do. How could it be otherwise? The only POV from which a redundant thing doesn’t seem redundant is a POV which is equally redundant, correspondingly redundant. Then everything looks fine, everything looks dandy. When we take all this mechanical-compulsive stuff seriously then we ourselves become mechanical-compulsive. That’s how it works. That’s the whole nature of the trick that we are falling for. It’s a big, big trick and the way that the trick works is that when we take the fiction seriouslythen we too become fictional.

Becoming fictional therefore is a very real and present danger! It’s more than a danger, it’s the danger. It’s the big cosmic danger. It’s the only danger – the danger of becoming fictional without knowing it, the danger of becoming unreal without knowing it. Given that we are so very gullible, so very prone to believing in stuff (taking stuff seriously) then its more than just a danger that we will become fictional, it’s a virtual certainty. It’s a foregone conclusion. It’s what happens all the time. It’s the way of things – we take redundant stuff seriously, and as a result we become redundant.

When we take redundant stuff seriously then we have no sense of humour, no sense of irony about what we are doing. That’s what ‘taking stuff seriously’ means, after all. It means that we have no sense of humour. We don’t get the joke. The redundant pseudo-reality says: “Look, here’s a development (either of the positive or negative variety, either ‘good-looking’ or ‘ugly looking’). Then – when we take it seriously – we go: “That’s really great!” or “That’s really terrible!” This is us believing in the redundant pseudo-reality. This is us losing our sense of humour/irony. This is us getting tricked.

Then as a result of being tricked we’re plunged into the state of unrelenting fictionality. This fictionality (this pseudo-reality) goes on and on forever but at the same time as going on forever (as linear time goes on forever) it never really gets anywhere because it’s redundant. ‘Redundant’ means that the ‘development’ which is being pointed to, high-lighted, hyped-up, etc, isn’t really there at all… It’s just more of the same. It’s the same old thing, fed back to us again as if it wasn’t the same old thing. And the thing which we being ‘developed’ was itself nothing more an unreal development of another, earlier unreal development!

When we see this, when we see the irony of what’s going on, the infinite redundancy of what’s going on, then we laugh. We don’t laugh at the redundancy (because there’s nothing there to laugh at), we laugh at ourselves for taking something that doesn’t exist seriously! This is the ‘lesson’ that’s in redundancy, the lesson that is in the ubiquitous all-consuming mechanical-compulsive reality. And not only do we see that the game which we are playing so seriously is empty, we see that the one who was playing it is also empty. Not only is the game empty, but so too is the one who has been constructing himself/herself in terms of the game empty. Emptiness has been taking emptiness seriously, thinking both that there was something there that really had to be done and that there was someone there to do it, someone there whose job is to do it…

Not only is it the case therefore that we believe that there is ‘something there to be done’ we believe that there is someone there who has to do it. It is essential that we do it – it is very, very important that we should ‘do the thing’. It’s downright compulsory, in fact! It’s in the rules. It’s the rules of the game that we have to do it. It’s in the rules of the game that we play the game. It’s the rules of the game that we don’t not play the game. It’s all completely serious. It couldn’t be more serious…

So the thing is that it’s all very serious in the sense that ‘we’re not free to take it or leave it’ – it’s our sacred duty to do whatever it is, and what’s more, to do it well, to do it correctly. Not succeeding isn’t acceptable – not succeeding would put us beyond the pale. We’d be under a very black cloud – no one would respect us anymore and we wouldn’t even respect ourselves. This is how the mechanical mind works. This is the life of the mechanical self. The thing is therefore that we define ourselves in terms of the game (just as other people define us in terms of the game) so that if we’re doing well at it then we’re great and if we aren’t then we aren’t so great. And if we can’t play the game at all then we just don’t signify. We don’t show up on the map at all.

We feel good about ourselves when we can successfully adapt to the empty game and we feel bad about ourselves when we can’t. We’re ‘over the moon’ one way and we’re ‘down in the dumps’ the other way. We see ourselves as being worthwhile if we play the game well and we see ourselves as being painfully useless if we don’t. So we’re defined by the game and if we’re defined by the game then this means that we are the game! When we play the game then the game is all there is. The game and the player of the game are the same thing and this ‘same thing’ is an empty fiction…

So the game (which is the mechanical-compulsive pseudo-reality) is a fiction and so am I. This is how things are when we don’t learn the lesson that is the mechanical-compulsive reality. And this is how things stay. This deluded situation goes on forever and ever, getting nowhere but seeming to. And when we wake up to it, when we finally snap out of the mechanical trance-state, this is a humorous situation. There’s a funny side to it all – there’s a funny side because we realize that we’ve been taking something very seriously when it was never actually there in the first place…

Nick Williams works and writes in the field of mental health and is particularly interested in non-equilibrium states of consciousness, which are states of mind that cannot be validated by standardized experiments or by reference to any formal theoretical perspective.